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The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

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Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#131

Post by bitwize »

loydb wrote: post #13
objectiveariel wrote: post #6

To me, this manifesto has little more than historical value. It's more an expression of generic adolescent angst rather than of hacker culture. It's a poor "manifesto" too. What exactly are the aims of The Hacker? "Exploring", "Outsmarting you", and "judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like". Platitudes, really, if you set aside the emotional outbursts surrounding them. The Jargon File offer…

To be fair, I was pretty damn angsty at the time :) Always exciting to see this pop up someplace new. It's being translated into Polish for a textbook this year as well.

Hey Loyd.

Face facts, you're never gonna live this one down. :) The document is emblematic of what social butterflies call the zeitgeist of an era. What was really more or less a bunch of kids messing around, they see as a revolution, akin to punk rock. "Conscience of a Hacker" seemed to validate their mythology of the 80s hacker as a cyberpunk revolutionary, so it will be preserved and repeated as part of the mythohistory of computing.

Plus it was quoted in Hackers and will be immortal on the strength of that alone.

Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#132

Post by crawsible »

objectiveariel wrote: post #6

To me, this manifesto has little more than historical value. It's more an expression of generic adolescent angst rather than of hacker culture. It's a poor "manifesto" too. What exactly are the aims of The Hacker? "Exploring", "Outsmarting you", and "judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like". Platitudes, really, if you set aside the emotional outbursts surrounding them. The Jargon File offer…

Just think: 30 years from now, my age group will be reminiscing about Justin Timberlake's speech in The Social Network.

what a time to be alive

Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#133

Post by rorykoehler »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #89
CodeMage wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm bitter for my age, but I feel that the culture has already gone through the crossroads. I do get what you're trying to say, though, but I believe that it's the industry that finds it self at the crossroads, not the culture. The culture itself has largely been co-opted by business concerns.

I'm unconvinced. All the wacky projects that usually pop up on show HN are pretty strong signs of a culture that encourages things that don't necessarily make business sense.

The number of times I show or talk about a side project with business people and they start talking about it as something I built to generate income rather than just for my own curiousity is quite amusing. I think for certain groups of people the idea of creating for purely intellectual purposes is completely alien. It is part of the reason many companies can't hold onto real technical talent. At a cerain point intellectual richness becomes the main priority in a hackers life and the only thing that will keep them around is challenging new problems to solve.

Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#134

Post by fcanela »

objectiveariel wrote: post #6

To me, this manifesto has little more than historical value. It's more an expression of generic adolescent angst rather than of hacker culture. It's a poor "manifesto" too. What exactly are the aims of The Hacker? "Exploring", "Outsmarting you", and "judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like". Platitudes, really, if you set aside the emotional outbursts surrounding them. The Jargon File offer…

It showed me (when I was a teenager living away from the city in the 90s) that I was not alone in my curiosity.

I had The Mentor Manifiesto in my walls, along with prints of code or networking diagrams (i.e. TCP handshake sequence).

I found the text really inspiring then.

Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#135

Post by eggy »

loydb wrote: post #110
eggy wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will not argue the angst angle or semantics of manifesto, but given the context of who and when they wrote it, it was and can still carry some weight. But just as your comment betrays your age (I think?), so does mine. I remember going to 2600 meetings in the lower plaza of the Citigroup building once a month. At that time, someone told me Feds come and photograph to record attendees (all 5 or 8 people if a good tu…

We found out that the SS was filming through hotel mirrors in a couple of rooms during Summercon 88. Poor Knight Lightning had to watch hours and hours of nothing but drunken shenanigans (because nobody trusted the dude who showed up out of nowhere claiming his handle was the "Dictator", so basically we trashed his room. I left a blender in there, the only thing I did in that room was mix batches of Margaritas.) When…

Great story. Glad you're posting here, a real treat. I used to belong to Echo in NYC, and met Mark that way once or twice.

I second your thoughts on 'Hackers' with the exception of its introduction of Angelina Jolie ;) For the record, there were no teenage girls like her around the hacking culture back then; what am I saying? There were no women at any of my meetups, period. I am glad to see that has changed, although there is a long way to go still.

I remember reading your words in my early 20s; it was motivating in a good way for me. It gave me a reason to introspect more on my activities, which were pretty misguided from 1978 on my Commodore PET with cassette drive to the computers I use nowadays.

Swapping prisoners: I had left NYU in 84. Before then you could, if you were so inclined, use your Bobst Library login credentials to telnet into the backend mainframe (Dec PDP 11 or Dec Vax's - can't remmeber). They had an off-campus 777 dial-up though. Ah, modem dial-up tones! I think somebody claimed to have logged on to a Houston NASA computer, and then the SYSADMIN popped on and asked that they identify themselves! ;)

Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#137

Post by znpy »

I find quite annoying that many people go "oh geez, what is this crap, nah, it's not like this" when this is a huge part of what brought us all that the hackerdom is today (whatever it is anyway).

Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#138

Post by RRRA »

Kalium wrote: post #101

It's interesting to contrast what YCombinator/Facebook mean by "hacker" and what it means at DEFCON. Or when this document was written. The former definitely has strong commercial overtones and the latter strong subversive overtones. They really are two very different meanings.

And to a lot of people here thinking this mentality is dead are, I think, confused by the fact that the growth and general appeal of computers have only diluted the hackers, but they are still growing in absolute numbers.

Same goes at DEFCON in a way, where so many people want to see what a hacker is that the whole conference looses its "direction" in a way, as a whole at least...

Re: The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

#140

Post by nicolas_t »

throwanem wrote: post #125
chadgeidel wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, really? I haven't read enough Heinlein - what was that in? I always thought Rapture of the Nerds was grounded in Vinge's "The Coming Technological Singularity" ( https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.ht... )

I honestly don't recall the name of the specific piece, but I do remember that it's anthologized in his collection Expanded Universe , and it was clearly the "Singularity" he described, although of course not by that name - there's even a chart and a curve for those readers not yet familiar with the concept of exponential growth! I remember it quite well, not least because I'd thought I was years past learning anythi…

Not sure I'd suggest The Door into Summer, it's one of the weakest books from Heinlein imho together with the Number of the Beast and I Will Fear No Evil. I'd usually recommend the Moon is a Harsh Mistress or one of his juveniles as the first book.
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